Ray Kurzweil and others suggest that by as early as 2029 the knowledge of how the human brain works and the level of complexity of computers will be enough to simulate a human mind. Then a human mind could be uploaded to a computer simulation that would be far more advanced than any Turing test, it would be indistinguishable from the original in video calls and audio calls.

In order to have a discussion about a topic you need to have a name for these beings.

The movie Transcendence explores some dark fantasy about how this would work. The concept has been around in science fiction since the mid-fifties in a story by Frederic Pohl called “The Tunnel Under the World” and is explored in popular movie fiction movies like “Tron”.

Once a human mind is uploaded this would be a possible way for a human to have some form of immortality. In addition, there is a potential that the codops hardware would function faster than the physical human mind as generations of the hardware improve.